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Recruitment Efforts Empowered by Intelliworks

Because the sources for recruits, and the strategies used to elicit their interest in Syracuse University, vary among the schools and colleges, correspondence with graduate and continuing education recruits historically has been managed independently at each school, college and at University College.  Enterprise solutions that work well for centralized recruitment organizations have been beyond the reach of the graduate program offices.  For that reason, these areas resorted to creating their own solutions, or worse, their needs were not met.  University College required more flexibility in streamlining their marketing efforts. 

Implementation of Intelliworks, a hosted Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) solution, started in April 2010 to provide a comprehensive enterprise recruiting solution to these issues.  Although the particulars of recruitment efforts differ across the schools and colleges, the requirements for supporting them are fairly standard, and Intelliworks meets them well:  

• Capture basic contact information efficiently, using a variety of modes such as
  • public-facing web inquiry forms
  • import of a spreadsheet of contacts
  • manual entry while on the phone
  • email integration via an Outlook plug-in
• Target email campaigns, with html formatting capabilities
• Manage events
• Monitor email campaign results
• Track recruit lifecycle changes
• Measure which efforts yield the highest number of applications

The project team is led by Cindy Hoalcraft of Enterprise Process Support and includes representatives from the program areas and Enrollment Management. Steven Medicis and Marilyn Butler from Enterprise Application Systems were elemental in configuring Intelliworks and building the integration with PeopleSoft, and Tim Jorgensen from Core Infrastructure Services created the installer for the Outlook plug-in.

This implementation is unique in that expertise in the system comes from its users (academic units), not from a central area. Configuration was completed over the summer through a series of collaborative sessions involving the early adopters - graduate programs from iSchool, Maxwell, and Human Ecology, along with University College.  "Our focus was to keep things generic enough so it can be used university-wide, while maintaining certain college-specific attributes so the system responds to their unique needs," said Cindy. 

According to Felicia Otero, Director of College Relations for the College of Human Ecology, "Intelliworks provides more flexibility than PeopleSoft.  We can integrate contact data from a variety of sources to create effective email campaigns, and we can document and track individual communications with our targeted prospects."   

"Intelliworks allows us to employ a systematic process for managing and engaging our prospective students,"  said Laurie J. McCarthy, Director of Marketing at University College.  "We now have the ability to personalize e-mail communication and to more effectively target our audiences, based on their wide variety of interests.  The campaign tracking functions allow us to know exactly who opens our e-mails and who does not.  It also allows us to more efficiently manage opt-outs.  We can easily view all interactions with our prospects and quickly determine their registration status." 

Finally, Sue Corieri, Assistant Dean at the iSchool says "Intelliworks enables us to better serve the inquiry and applicant pool. A case is built for each individual and all communications and interactions with the candidate are logged. It is an efficient means to manage our communications, as well as gather valuable data about our recruitment strategies."

The implementation features a daily feed of graduate and UC recruits from Peoplesoft, and tracks each person's progression through the recruit lifecycle.  This enables enrollment managers to work with recruits who originated from central processing as well as those gathered within their units.

Weekly user group meetings help recruiters build their skill with Intelliworks' functionality to track and improve effectiveness of their efforts. Additional graduate program areas are being engaged.

For more information, contact Cindy Hoalcraft at clhoalcr@syr.edu and 443-4809.

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